I feel that Athol Fugard and his wife, Paula Fourie, changed my life in the autumn of 2022 when I visited South Africa to spend time with them and their daughter Halle. We were supposed to be working on a book together, and we did; but our time became so much more than that. There were lunches in the house or the restaurant round the corner; walks in the woods; a braai that went on past midnight.
Over coffee in the mornings I’d sit with Athol and we’d use an app on his phone to identify the calls of all the birds in the garden. Then he might tell me a story from his life – the awe he felt when he asked Yvonne Bryceland to smash a chair to bits during rehearsals for Antigone and she proceeded to do so for a full 30 minutes; the journey he made by sea at 18 from Cairo to Japan, when an illiterate Somalian sailor used to watch him every night as he wrote a novel by hand, sitting on a deck hatch; and the way that sailor never spoke to him again when he finished the novel, decided it was terrible, and threw it in the sea.
Just once, he told me the story of a play he was planning. He spoke elegantly, carefully, slightly formally; I hardly dared breathe for fear he’d stop. He and I had shared certain extreme experiences, albeit more than half a century apart, which had been formative for both of us, and I think as a result we bonded quite strongly; over the course of my time with him we both cried together, taking one another’s hands. And all the time he treated me like I was enough. To receive that from someone whose life had been so vast radically altered my perspective.
His partner in creation and fun was Paula, perhaps the most formidably intelligent person I know. The project we were all working on together was, in part, an examination of Athol’s flaws. They were relentlessly clear-eyed and analytical in all they did. But they were also two extremely romantic people, to the point where they’d decided to start a family together. Athol remained a dreamer, full of plans to the end. His most striking quality, though, was his endless gratitude, which I think was nurtured by his many years as a practising Buddhist. He felt very lucky to have lived an extraordinary life.
I think that life contains an urgent lesson for us. His work is a model for how to resist a regime one detests while remaining committed to the country one loves – a pressing question for a great many people today. In his final public appearance, speaking to an online audience convened by the Society of Authors last year, he shared what I thought might be the key tenet of that project: “Anger is a withering emotion. It is better to write out of love.”
